Geraint and Daniel recently spent a day at Wraysbury on the Buoyancy and Trim workshop and in North Cornwall on the Accelerated Decompression Procedures Course. Here is their account of these regional courses.
BUOYANCY AND TRIM WORKSHOP
The day started with a briefing and a set of lectures around the importance of buoyancy control and how the general principles can be applied as well as some commentary about the impact of good trim.
Our first of two dives was an experiment dive where we could fiddle with weighting and trim and practice some of the skills before the assessment. We navigated a maze while maintaining good buoyancy, hovering parallel with a feature under the water and then slowly ascending with a stop of at least two minutes at every meter from 6m to 1m and then one final stop at half a meter.
The second dive was an assessed version of the first dive and Geraint and I did a great job of maintaining our buoyancy all the way up and doing various skills at each stop like spinning on the spot, mask clearing and attitude adjustments. This was later confirmed when our instructor awarded us both “Black” for Buoyancy and Trim.
ACCELERATED DECOMPRESSION PROCEDURES WITH TWINSET SDC
This was held in North Cornwall not far from Rock and started in a nearby boat yard on Saturday morning. Our Instructor, Mark, started by running us through some of the theory associated with the Twinset course and the ADP course. He was very clear about teaching “the BSAC way” and what pragmatic alterations we could make after training.
The first dive was a 6m skills dive where we went through mask clearing, spare mask replacement, valve shut-off procedures, reg-switching for the deco stage, air sharing with long hose etc.
The second dive was in 23 m of water on a wreck. The vis was atrocious so we all lined off. We didn’t do a deco dive as we ascended before the no-stop limit but we still simulated swapping to 80% mixes at 9m and switching gasses on our computers.
Mark had an incident on the dive which resulted in a severe cut to his finger so he was taken to Truro hospital for stitches. While we waited the three of us went through the manual process of planning an accelerated deco dive using the tables and the materials we’d been given the previous night. Mark eventually came back about 10 o’clock, completed the lectures for the course and we finished about midnight!
On the Sunday we buddied up and dived our plan on the Indus – a wreck at about 45 m but as we’d planned for 40 m we were hovering above it – plan the dive and dive the plan! The wreck was fantastic and I wish I’d had more time on it. I had no problems switching gasses on the way up and we did our accelerated deco.
Back at the boat yard we unloaded the boat together, got de-kitted and loaded the cars. I was able to sign off dive management for Dive Leader as well as the ADP and Twinset SDCs. Geraint and I are now both Advanced Twinset divers!
We would recommend both these courses to anyone thinking about doing more decompression diving. I am very pleased that we will be able to practice our Accelerated Decompression on my next dive trip to Scapa Flow.
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